Can Altshuller’s Matrix Be Skipped Using CBR and Semantic Similarity Reasoning?

Abstract

Inventive Design is a research field born on the basis that TRIZ body of knowledge was both promising and original, but also containing inconsistencies that only an in-depth scientific work achieved by a community of researchers could handle for its evolution. Amongst the techniques used by TRIZ community, Altshuller’s Contradiction Matrix combined with the 40 Inventive Principles that appears as a flagship for newcomers and observers. This rather old tool from Altshuller has undergone many researches and a large quantity of evolutions have been proposed for its rebuilding. Nevertheless, after several attempt of practices, two major drawbacks in its use still appears to engineers. The first one is when associating contradiction’s parameters to one or several of the 39 Generic Engineering Parameters, the second is to interpret the resulting Inventive Principles appearing in the cells of the Contradiction Matrix. These two potential reasons of inefficiencies are known to TRIZ world, but only few proposals have been made by researches in the community to cope with these drawbacks. This paper proposes to report about the use of Case-based Reasoning (CBR) associated to semantic similarity algorithms as a means to directly place users in front of a set of eligible solutions when trying to solve a contradiction, therefore avoiding the use of the Contradiction Matrix. Our research has now reached a milestone since we have developed an online web-application associated with a database and a case base for testing the inventive problem-solving environment with users and compare it with classical use of the matrix. We also summarize the architecture of our methodology and illustrate it with a case study.